If you’re unfortunate enough to get a particularly aggressive virus or piece of malware on your computer, the typical free anti-virus suitesThe 10 Best Free Anti-Virus ProgramsThe 10 Best Free Anti-Virus ProgramsYou must know by now: you need antivirus protection. Macs, Windows and Linux PCs all need it. You really have no excuse. So grab one of these ten and start protecting your computer!Read More will only be able to get you so far. You can never be fully confident that their scan and removal tools will have wiped every single trace of the infection from your machine.

Instead, it’s best to turn to an app that specializes in finding and/or removing aggressive malware. These tools shouldn’t replace your anti-virus suite — they won’t keep you protected. They are solely for the purpose of detection and deletion.

A Word of Caution

Please keep the following two points in mind before using any of these tools.

First: Because these seven apps are designed to remove extremely resilient viruses, they frequently identify false positives. Deleting false positives can have grave consequences for your machine. In the worst case, you might need to reinstall your entire operating system.

Rkill does not delete any files. Therefore, once your scan has finished, run a standard malware removal tool to get rid of the offending entries from your system. Do not restart your computer between the completion of the scan and running the malware tool — doing so will allow the killed processes to restart.

The app offers various scans. The main scan covers areas such as running processes, the registry, drivers, services, and NetSvcs. The extended scan also includes users accounts, the security center, firewall rules, and a lot more.

Farbar Recovery Scan Tool also allows you to fix problems, but you’ll need to create the Fixlist.txt file yourself. If you’re not security-savvy, head to the BleepingComputer.com forums and someone will help you.

From a user perspective, some of the most frustrating and frightening infections are the ones that prevent your computer from booting. All your work, media, and music suddenly becomes inaccessible.

If you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in this situation, don’t despair. You just need to download Dr. Web LiveDisk. It will let you boot your system regardless of a malware infection.

The software has three key features that make it appealing; it can find and delete infected and suspicious files, it can extract your most important files to another computer or a USB flash drive, and it can cure any infected objects.

You can download the software directly to a USB drive, or CD for ease-of-use.

Norton rightly has a terrible reputation in the world of anti-virus, but that doesn’t mean some of its products aren’t really useful.

One such product is the Power Eraser. The free-to-use app possesses what is arguably the most aggressive anti-malware scan out of all the tools on this list. As such, it often marks legitimate apps as viruses, so be extra careful when you use it. If you do accidentally delete a non-infected file, the app does offer a roll-back feature.

It’s especially useful if an infection is preventing you from installing, using, or updating a traditional anti-virus suite.

Remember, Power Eraser is not a standalone anti-virus app. Independent tests have shown it performs poorly if it’s used in that way.

The final tool on this list is ComboFix. It’s another malware removal tool that offers two key features.

Scan and Removal — As you’d expect, ComboFix has an extensive scan and removal tool. For typical malware infections, it’s more than adequate. Removal is performed automatically once a scan is completed.

Report Creation — If a malware threat is particularly tough to removal, the app will produce a detailed report for you to share with a security professional or on a security forum.

The developer of the app explicitly warns against acting on the report unless you are extremely sure of your actions. Due to the power of the tool, doing so can severely damage your system.

Note that ComboFix is only available for Windows XP/Vista/7 systems. It is not compatible with Windows 8 or later.

Which Tool Do You Use?

I’ve introduced you to seven valuable tools you can turn to if you’re stuck down by an aggressive virus. Hopefully, they’ll get your machine running perfectly again in no time.

I’d love to know what other tools and apps you would add to this list. What do you use when you need to find and remove resilient malware?

1. The free version of Malwarebytes. It's one of the first things I add to Windows, and is very good at spotting and removing malware and junkware that slipped past the primary antivirus.
2. ADWCleaner and Junkware Removal Tool. These are mainly useful for getting rid of browser junk like toolbars and search redirects. ADWCleaner is particularly effective, but sometimes breaks things.
3. Linux-based rescue systems. These scan the entire filesystem without Windows running. The benefit of this is that any malware (including rootkits) will be dormant and cannot activate any defenses it may have against detection and eviction. There are a number of these rescue systems available. My favorites are the ones from Avira, Bitdefender and Comodo, which are all user-friendly (though Bitdefender seems to take forever to boot) and have good browsers that can be used to research whatever malware they report finding. Kaspersky is not quite as user-friendly, and the browser isn't very good (at least in the version I have, which is a couple of years old now). AVG is not user-friendly, and generates a lot of false positives. I had a hard time getting F-Secure to boot, and I don't recall what it was like once it did.

Dan is a British expat living in Mexico. He is currently the Social Editor for MakeUseOf. He was formerly the Creative Editor and Finance Editor. Prior to his writing career, he was a Financial Consultant. He holds various certifications from the University of Leeds, the University of Cambridge, and the…